The Morning Show Review: My Least Favorite Year (Season 2 Episode 1)

When Apple first launched a streaming platform with original content, it was clear that it thought The Morning Show, with its prestige feel and ultra A+ list cast was meant to be its flagship series. But despite its gleaming production values and admirable dedication to telling a complex story with no easy answers, it’s often felt like a throwback to shows that don’t really exist anymore, rather than the new, cutting edge drama Apple so clearly wanted it to be. 

The Morning Show Season 2 Episode 1, “My Least Favorite Year,” sees the series return feeling in much the same way as it did when it left — for both good and ill. The character work remains incredibly solid, particularly when it comes to the slippery, morally gray space most of these people operate in regarding their professional careers, but its pace remains glacial, and much of the premiere is simply table-setting for the rest of the season. 

The thing is, at this point, you probably already know whether you like this aspect of the series. The Morning Show has always been sort of narratively ponderous, and there’s little indication that will change in its sophomore outing.

For example, although it’s obvious Alex is absolutely going to go back to UBA — whether it’s because she’s bored, afraid, or simply wants the primetime show Cory has promised her — but there’s no guarantee that’s going to actually happen any time soon. 

Though the episode picks up in the moments immediately following Bradley and Alex’s decision to out Fred’s behavior at the en — and the network’s attempts to cover it up — and shows us both women promising to have each other’s backs, this is the only scene that Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston share in the premiere. 

“My Least Favorite Year” then jumps ahead several months to show us how things have changed in the wake of the bombshell announcement. And in many ways, the answer appears to be not much — or, possibly a lot, but not in the ways that matter. mean, one of the first things we see is that a male UBA evening news anchor is being accused of emotionally abusing his staff. 

Alex apparently quit The Morning Show fairly dramatically, garnering herself a ton of magazine covers in the process. She’s retreated to a picturesque Maine house to write her memoirs in the snow. Cory got fired and then rehired for reasons we don’t yet know, and Bradley got a new co-anchor and embraced a heretofore unseen team player attitude.

Bradley’s new co-host is getting promoted to the evening news desk, and since her ratings are down, internal conversations begin about whether she should be replaced. New corporate whiz kid Stella seems convinced the time to start fresh is here but Cory wants Alex back. (Because there’s the whole premise of this show to consider and everything.)

Alex, for her part, insists she doesn’t want to come back, but it couldn’t be more obvious that life chopping wood in picturesque snow doesn’t suit her. It seems as though this whole thing is just an attempt to run away from her problems — from truly facing her culpability in the Mitch situation, her fear that people will blame her even more for allowing his lechery to go on once Maggie’s tell-all book comes out, and a sort of…vague malaise that this is where her life has ended up.

On the other end of the spectrum is Bradley, who has apparently gone in on supporting the show and the network in the wake of Alex’s departure. She’s doing fluff news, she’s dyed her hair blonde, she’s doing a literal song and dance routine with Eric, her new co-host. This hardly seems like the journalism she wanted to do when we first met her. 

The only time in “My Least Favorite Year” that Bradley even feels even remotely like herself is the scene in which she confronts Cory about keeping Eric’s promotion from her. She’s furious and righteous and that’s the Bradley I love. (And want more of!)

One of the elements of the Season 2 premiere that I can’t quite decide how I feel about is the slow dread involving all things COVID-19. “My Least Favorite Year” is very deliberate about the precise moment in which it’s setting itself, from simply mentioning the date multiple times and to its overt references to an unidentified respiratory disease in China. 

I mean the part where Mia overtly refused to cover the Chinese illness in favor of other “more important” stories…it feels like nothing so much as the moment in a horror movie where you realize the killer is already in the house. 

We can’t know yet whether The Morning Show’s decision to write the pandemic into Season 2 is a good one or not, and we won’t until we see how it plays out in tandem with the rest of the story the series was already planning on telling.

New York City was certainly uniquely devastated by the earliest days of COVID-19 and it’s probably necessary for a show that has so thoroughly embedded the Big Apple into its very DNA to somehow address it. How that’s ultimately going to work out though, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• Though the season premiere of The Morning Show makes multiple references to Hannah’s overdose last season, including the final moment bombshell that her family is suing UBA for wrongful death, there’s little indication that anyone at the network has truly wrestled with their own culpability in what happened to her. I sincerely hope her death isn’t swept under the rug.
• I truly hope that this season delves into Bradley’s decision to become the ultimate team player in the wake of Alex’s departure. I mean, she dyed her hair! Did she do all this out of self-interest? Because she trusted Cory? Felt guilty about Hannah’s death? it seems so unlike her.
• I have so many questions about how they did the Times Square NYE filming. Are all those people extras or did they green screen in footage from previous years?
• The drone shot through an empty Times Square with a CDC billboard about COVID-19 looming over it was something else.

What did you think of this episode of The Morning Show? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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New episodes of The Morning Show stream Fridays on AppleTV+.

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